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Comment by ffwd | Hacker News Reader

The way I read it was that Matt saw that WP needed to evolve to compete with everything else that exists, and that the volunteer release lead model that they used before could never lead to anything like Gutenberg in such a short time.

All Matt has done and said makes me believe he loves OSS, freedom of the user and democratization of publishing. Why would he ruin his own creation by looking for an exit when WP is already hugely popular and more importantly why abandon what seems to be his principles around freedom/OS. I will eat my words in 5-10 years if it isn't true but I think everyone will see he will focus just as much on wp.org and freedom as he does Automattic (ie keeping as much as possible open, free alternatives (like jetpack), etc)

ALso Gutenberg is not nearly as bad as those reviews say. It is much better even only in the last few months, though a lot of UX development is needed it is a powerful editor.

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I actually tried Gutenberg a few months back. It was nearly unusable as a document editor. Typing, undo, cursor movement, and moving between blocks was a glitchy mess, and so was importing pages from the classic editor (though that's a difficult problem). I reported several issues, and a few actually got fixed after weeks. Though I haven't tested again since I decommissioned my WordPress Pi image.

>I actually tried Gutenberg a few months back. It was nearly unusable as a document editor.

I've been using it for a couple of years in WP and had absolutely no issue with it as a document editor.

And I've have used everything from LaTeX to Markdown, and from Word to Mellel, including all kinds of web-based editors.

I'd be interested to see if there's any data out there showing that Gutenberg contributed to an increase in Wordpress adoption (both the open source version and selling WordPress.com as a service). My hunch is that people aren't coming to the platform because of the block editor, but the rest of the eco-system. Gutenberg still isn't as user friendly as Squarespace or Wix, and it's different enough from how OG Wordpress operates that most power users don't like it either. I think a more friendly editor was the obvious next step, so it's not misguided, but something about how it was implemented doesn't seem to click with a lot of users.

Anecdotal, but I loathe Gutenberg, and almost entirely shut down my blog because of it. I eventually decided to pay for hosting the open source version with their plugins so I could use the Classical Editor plugin, but Gutenberg was absolutely awful. The posts I was writing were quite long, as they were transcriptions of stories (the number of SEO red flags they give off is hilarious, honestly), and Gutenberg was just so laggy trying to go back and forth between my annotations of the stories at the bottom and the actual story at the top. I eventually just started typing it up in Pages and copy-pasting it over because it was such a pain to edit...None of those problems exist on Classical Editor, though I still transcribe them in Pages to keep them all in the same document for if I ever decide to publish.

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